


Through A Glass Darkly

by ancestrallizard



Series: Kitchen Interludes [1]
Category: Fate/Grand Order, Fate/stay night & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen, Gender Dysphoria, Gender Issues, Mash is there a little bit but its mostly ritsuka, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-20
Updated: 2019-04-20
Packaged: 2020-01-20 14:54:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18527341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ancestrallizard/pseuds/ancestrallizard
Summary: The world is ending, and a lot of things are changing. Maybe you can change too.





	Through A Glass Darkly

**Author's Note:**

> This is about my player character, Bellerophon, but its 2nd person and their name doesnt end up used in the fic. so it can apply to any player character if you want?

You see yourself in the mirror and hate what stares back at you.

This is nothing new. The sight of yourself more often than not sends revulsion twisting through your gut like food poisoning. You used to think it would go away if you just ignored it, but it only got worse as you aged. You’ve gotten good at avoiding mirrors, but there’s a long rectangular mirror right across from the bed in your Chaldea dorm, and sometimes you slip up. 

It’s not you height, exactly, or your weight, exactly, but just, everything all together. You can’t find the words to explain the wrongness you feel seeing yourself, in reflection or in person, and knowing that this was you.

Usually you swallow it down and grimace through the rest of the day like your own body didn’t make you want to scream, but something about that day was different. Maybe it was chance, maybe it was leftover exhaustion from the mission the day before, or maybe it was end of the world collapsing social conventions from under you like rotten pilings.

Instead of running away and swallowing your shame and hate and misery, you face your reflection head on and snap your fingers. The spell is simple, something even your unremarkable magic circuits can handle. Nearly imperceptibly, your height changes.

You study your reflection. Does this help, you ask yourself, is it better? Worse?

It’s different.

Different how?

You avoid your eyes. I don’t know. Different.

You revert your height, get dressed, and go about your business.

=

That should have been the end of it. But whenever you can wake up safely in your dorm in Chaldea, you change something about yourself before you get dressed. Sometimes it’s your height, or your shape, or your hair. It’s not a straightforward process, as what can make you feel neutral one day can make you feel nauseous the next. But the process as a whole isn’t as daunting as younger-you once thought, flipping through Magus history books and reading all of the ways extensive self-modification spells had been punished in the past. Slowly, you move past just feeling different and start finding changes that make you feel good, if only a bit.

You always revert to your original appearance before leaving. It works, for a while, but your missions can stretch on for a long time and there are weeks away where you can’t alter yourself at all. It puts you noticeably on edge. Near the end of a particularly grueling mission, when your muscles burn and you’re tired of watching over your shoulder for monsters and your skin feels like its going to strangle you, Mash asks you a basic question and you snap at her. You apologize immediately, but her expression, wide-eyed and hurt, makes you feel lower than dirt for a long time afterward. 

You keep going, for the sake of team cohesion and because, for once in you’re life, you can. The use of magic for something not related to the pursuit of power and status is treated as an oddity at best and dangerously aberrant at worst. What you were doing wasn’t technically illegal, but you would have caught hell for it back at school or at home. What would they even do in Chaldea if someone saw you? _Fire_ you?

In addition to physical changes, you start to play with aesthetics. You mix and match pieces of different uniforms, alter how you stand, how you speak, the pitch of you voice. The alterations still don’t follow you outside your room, but some things still change. You get a better grasp on your. You forget your own misery long enough to start talk to others outside of missions. The heavy malcontent that has sat in your bones since puberty slowly started to shift.

It goes on, until one dark morning with snow pelting down from nowhere, something clicks in your soul, like trying on shoes that fit after wearing them on the wrong feet for your whole life. You feel light. You look at yourself and think, Oh. This is what it feels like to like how you look. It probably wouldn’t last, but for a moment, it was enough.

You’d asked Mash to eat breakfast with you that morning. You have to change and leave, but at this moment forcing yourself back into the way you were is like pulling nails, possible but painful and unnatural.

You don’t want to change. So you don’t.

=

Making pancakes is familiar enough to take your mind off the feeling that you’re standing at the edge of a chasm. You asked Mash to let you make something for her awhile ago, both as a further apology for loosing your temper and because she mentioned never having pancakes before, a crime you could not let stand. You wanted to go all out and make her something fancy, but for now you stick with a plain recipe from scratch, so she has a frame of reference to try other kinds later if she wants.

You set up shop in one of the unused kitchenettes near your dorm. You slipped by there to cook, sometimes, but this is the first time you’re using it in the day, or for another person.

For the same reason most cooking areas are barren, there are lots of spare ingredients, enough that you feel guiltless making such a luxury.

Mash sits at the table and pets a dozing Fou while you work. Something about the warm familiarity of cooking loosens your tongue, and before you know it you’re rambling about the first time you made pancakes while you mix and pour in the present.

Your family had cooks to make food for you, of course, but you’d just seen a movie with your older brother the day before about a psychic little girl, and something about the way she made pancakes in a montage stuck with you. You wanted to make some too – the biggest, fluffiest, roundest pancakes possible, so you snuck down to one of the kitchens in the dead of night to try to make some, fueled by a desire to make food for everyone and a vague idea of how to actually make pancakes.

You’re worried you’re talking too much and taking up too much space, but Mash seemed interested enough (probably just politeness), so you decide to talk until she says otherwise. 

Mash stops petting Fou when you get to the part about trying to flip the misbegotten batter with what weak powers you had and sending the gooey mess everywhere, including out the door and onto a very old, very expensive tapestry section. “Were you parents angry?”

“Oh yeah, they were pissed,” You reply. You scoop up the finished pancakes form the griddle (fluffy enough but not as evenly round as you want), and start pouring out the last of the batter to make miniature ones for Fou. “Especially after I tried dragging it upstairs to hide it in my room and I knocked over an urn. Not the best plan, but I was five, I think? Or six? Anyway, the noise woke my brother up, and he got me cleaned up, threw flour on himself, and woke up our parents and told them he was the one who ruined the tapestry and the urn.” Fou’s pancakes finished, you scoop them onto a small plate and pour out some dark syrup, cutting up the portions into bite sized pieces. “They let it go, because it was him. Ma fixed the urn but the stain never totally came off the tapestry, and I was allowed to stay at home and wasn’t forced to become a runaway in a circus or something.”

Mash smiles, and her eyes look a bit distant. “It sounds nice to have a sibling.”

You shrug. “It has its perks.” The Pancake Incident was before your brother stopped talking to you altogether, but breakfast wasn’t the time for downers. 

You ferry over the plates and syrup. Fou immediately hops up and starts eating, but Mash doesn’t follow suit. “Senpai, I don’t think I’ve seen you wear a skirt since you’d been in Chaldea.”

And just like that all your warm cozy feelings vanish like a dream, and you’re left small and cold and scared. You swallow and respond, voice rigidly neutral, “Well. I didn’t feel like it before.” 

You’re ready to bolt from the table and down the mountain that doesn’t exist anymore. Some small logical part of yourself knows there’s nothing to be afraid of, that Mash wouldn’t hurt you, both because of her nature and because of the command seal on your hand. A much larger part of your brain that has always waited for this retribution is crowing that that doesn’t matter, judgment was always coming for you and judgment is here. It was always going to come from anyone we cared about; it may as well arrive through Mash.

“It’s just that you seem much happier than usual,” She says, “And I was wondering if the skirt was the reason.”

“Oh! Oh. Um, that’s part of it, yeah.”

There’s an opening here to talk about what’s been going on with you, but you wouldn’t know how to take it even if you wanted to. If you barely understand yourself how can you explain it to someone else?

And then she says, “You look very nice in it,” and you are left completely adrift. Neutrality you hoped for, ridicule you expected, but compliments were completely out of the question.

You duck your head, face and neck flushing. “Um. Thanks. Go ahead and try a piece before Fou takes it.”

The little creature had, in fact, been edging closer to Mash’s plate, having long ago finished its own. She gently pushes it away and finally takes a piece.

Even if the encounter hadn’t gone well and she hadn’t responded magnanimously to your appearance, the way her eyes light up after that first bite would have made the whole thing worth it.

“So, you like it?” You ask.

She nods enthusiastically and starts in on the rest.

You separate a small portion from your own plate and hand it to Fou. You’re glad at least two members of Chaldea can stand your cooking. You want to ask Mash how it tastes to her exactly, to find out if Demi-Servants and Servants by extension might have altered sensations of taste you should keep in mind so you can maybe make things for the others, but questions can wait.

Footsteps echo down the hall towards you, and you both look up to see Roman standing in the doorway, slightly out of breath. “Hey! I’m not too late to grab some, am I?”

You had in fact made extra on the off chance he could eat with you both. You give him that as well as some from your plate.

He digs in immediately, but halfway through stops and looks at you. “Did you do something with your hair? It looks good.”

As Mash and Roman talk and eat, you lean back in your chair and catch sight of yourself in a dark window.

You almost don’t recognize yourself. Not because of your clothes or body but your expression – you can’t remember the last time you looked like this, face open and eyes bright. You can’t remember the last time you smiled.

Something tiny and soft touches your cheek. Fou sniffs at you from your shoulder, and then taps a paw at the corner of your eye. Both are watering, you notice with sudden surprise. 

You sniff and rub an arm across them. “I’m okay, bud, I’m fine.”

And for the first time in a long time you mean it.

**Author's Note:**

> I've had FGO for maybe two weeks and im really bad at it
> 
> ancestrallizard.tumblr.com
> 
> https://twitter.com/DVLblues


End file.
